As several of the foregoing posts have noted, variations on a theme are not foreign to music. In classical music many of these works are titled as such, e.g., variation on a theme by Haydn, etc.

Maybe modern music should contain an attribution scheme like that employed by references to prior scientific publications.

That one should or should not get paid based on whether a song is written de novo or a variation on the theme of another artist is a modern market invention more related to placing songs on salable albums than to the process of creating music, and it's a silly diversion from the noble thesis of this article.

Does Led Zeppelin's music unite disparate musical elements and therefore tend to unite disparate cultures? The examples of its musical heirs in this article indicate that it does.

And Willie Dixon didn't go out and explore Moroccan themes, so maybe LZ deserves some credit for its diverse and expansive repertoire independent of the marketing assumptions of 21st century consumers.

I'm not that upset that Zep did a lot of blues covers. A lot of artists back then did. Just listen to any CCR ablum, there mostly covers.

The term "cover song" is even derived from the practice of white artists performing a song that was created by a black artists in order to appeal to white teens in the 1950's. Although these covers where usually more subdued than the black version.

Not only did Zep do these covers justice, most of them don't even really sound like the original, they retain the basics, but as they say "the song DOES NOT remain the same"

That being said, it would have been nice for them to give credit, but you guys can only provide me with one instance in which the original artists got upset, and they settled with him.

Mr. Bramscher,
I am in full agreement..my music collection rarely includes anything produced after the 70's (with a few rare exceptions: The Talking Heads for instance are perhaps one of the most radical bands, in terms of lyrics..that I know of). But wouldn't we becoming like Vladimir Lenin when he refused to listen to Beethoven (although he loved the music) just because it came from a boureoise background, if we rejected any and all music that doesn't promote a message in line with our political agenda. The problem is with the MSM choice of choosing mind-numbing and awful sounds to pass as "art", and this surely contributes to the fact that no new musical artists of note are being produced. Is this due to the state of our citizenry, as you suggest by your comment on the 60's? Or is this due to the corporate consolidation of our major media (radio, television, internet, etc)? I smell a vicious circle.

DDT-
Anyone who's ever listened to a significant amount of pre-electric blues knows that they "ripped eachother off" constantly. Listen to the hundred million billion recorded versions of "Catfish Blues." It was common to borrow heavily from other players and add your own touch. Robert Johnson in particular recorded mostly songs based on other people's tunes. Son House says he heard the melody he used on My Black Mama/Death Letter played by another man in the 1930's. And really, Blind Willie Johnson's "Nobody's Fault But Mine" and Led Zeppelin's are completely different songs. They're actually both among my favorites from each artist. It's funny to hear of Muddy Waters suing Led Zeppelin for this sort of thing, considering that some of his biggest hits (Rollin and Tumblin, Rolling Stone...) were based on earlier standards.

There's no band that sounds like Led Zeppelin. I personally think copyrighting and notions of "ownership" have no place in art, and really end up devaluing and deadening it... But sadly, very little in our society is separated from money and property these days. Art is meant to be made in the context of a community, and shared, and that's basically how the blues came into existence in the first place.

I've been drumming seriously since the age of ten (now 54) and John Bonham was one hell of a drummer. If I'd listened to him rather than (so much) Keith Moon (back in my teens) my sense of time would have been better later on, and wouldn't have needed so much adjustment during my early-pro years. Sorry, but I just can't sit by and listen to someone claim that Bonham was just a "plod-along" drummer. He played in the pocket before other drummers even knew there was a pocket.

STREET CRED? (YOU decide...)

I play a modern successor (Hungarian Cymbalom--i.e., Hammered Dulcimer--traditionally played with hand-held 'hammers') to the Persian Santur (circa 2,500 ago)
with a technique I invented: "bowhammers"...also seen in this link: the shared political page of commondreams commentary...

for whatever it's worth (curiosity?)...at any rate, I remain gratefully indebted to the "middle east" for creating my main instrument and changing my life forever, as instruments are indeed ultimately given to make, in effective turn, 'instruments' of those who apply their lifetime to playing them...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=iYe7D6hJtRU

Thanks, DDT, for your informative post. Although I came of age loving Zeppelin in the 70s, I later became aware of how unoriginal much of their work was as I heard classic blues on public and community radio stations. Recently, another disappointment has been hearing "Rock and Roll" as the soundtrack to a TV add for Cadillac. It wasn't a surprise, though. Only a few well known artists haven't sold out: Neil Young, Springsteen, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and maybe a few more.

Led Zep was a great band, but like DDT and many others I am dismayed by their tendency to take credit for (and gain financially from) other peoples creativity. For those interested, a long list of "questionable" songs and further info can be found here: http://www.turnmeondeadman.net/Zep/Originals.php

Not always useful to compare music or art in a linear scale of worst/best. I'd also have to put Hendrix, Cream, and many progressive rock bands up there (Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and a whole bunch of more obscure/European stuff that one can discover if one browses a search engine).

RadicalConfucian,

I agree with what you say in principle, but you must admit there's been a filtering going on, deliberate or no, causing American pop music to devolve into the utter drivel it is today. The chief topics which are "allowed" or promoted by the media machine are self-destructive, narcissistic, etc. in nature. Social- or radical-anything is frowned upon.

In the mid-80's I basically quit listening to new pop altogether, and went instead into folk, fingerstyle guitar, world beat, and jazz. Folk music, not pop music, is where the messages remain. Blues is a subset of folk. That the 60's and 70's had such great music is due to the fusion nature of the era. You had blues, jazz, folk, rock, pop, and international influences coming together for the first time. Once industry co-opted it, the folk element was the first casualty.

It's the same story outside of music also.

The beauty is that this folk (blues, folk-rock, jazz/fusion styles, etc.) element lives on -- mainly in local/indie bands. Just not in mainstream music.

This article does more to confirm my belief that LZ is the best rock/blues band ever.

LeVine and Ahmed write: "Most rock legends mined the blues." In actuality, Led Zeppelin plundered the blues. The band expropriated any number of blues songs and claimed writing credit for them. This enabled the band, primarily the songwriting duo of Page and Plant, to garner the royalties at the expense of the original author(s).

Zep notably ripped off Memphis Minnie ("When the Levee Breaks"), Blind Willie Johnson ("Nobody's Fault but Mine"), Robert Johnson ("The Lemon Song"), Sonny Boy Williamson ("Bring It on Home"), Howlin' Wolf and Albert King (both in the same song, "How Many More Times"), and Muddy Waters ("Whole Lotta Love"). Waters sued Zep, claiming that Zep's "Whole Lotta Love" was a rewrite of his "You Need Love"; Waters and the band settled out of court. Led Zeppelin properly gave credit to Willie Dixon when it covered "You Shook Me" on its debut album, but this most likely was because the Jeff Beck Group had covered the song--and had given Dixon credit--on its debut album six months previously.

One could argue that the blues is a tradition of "borrowing" someone's song in any case; for example, "A Spoonful Blues" was in the hands of Charley Patton in the 1920s before Willie Dixon took credit for it in the 1950s. However, the key difference is that Led Zeppelin, comprising white boys from Great Britain, got stinking rich partly from this "borrowing" while by and large blues artists most decidedly did not.

Like other '70s teenage boys, I was a Led Zep fanatic of the first order. My interest led me to investigate the Yardbirds, the legendary '60s band from whose ashes Led Zeppelin actually formed. (Jimmy Page was the last lead guitarist in the Yardbirds when that band dissolved, and Page had to recruit members to fill the Yardies' contractual obligations; those members became Zeppelin.) Listening to the Yardbirds led me to Eric Clapton and Cream, and then to other blues-rock bands of that time. As I learned more about those artists, I began to discover the blues artists whose songs were covered by those blues-rock bands. The more blues artists I listened to, the more I realized where a lot of Zep's licks and lyrics were coming from--and how the band was not acknowledging that.

Although I lost a lot of respect for the band, I still think it is one of the greatest hard-rock bands ever, with great range and creativity along with sheer rock power. Page and Plant's Eastern musical influences, which began with "Black Mountain Side" from the first album, culminated with "Kashmir" a few years later.

On the other hand, it is a chore to listen to drummer John Bonham plod along--he's supposed to drive the beat, not, as is the case, get pulled along by Page and bassist John Paul Jones (the band's secret weapon). That's not being "tight but loose"--it's just sloppy timekeeping, or as critic Dave Marsh once put it, "For a band that couldn't keep time with a Rolex metronome . . . " (A much better example of an unorthodox but effective rock rhythm section was the Who's bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon. Lots of rhythmic and melodic complexity and flexibility going on there.) Meanwhile, Plant's vocals in a number of songs can really get on the nerves with their high-register acrobatics.

No, not every artist has to be a Pete Seeger. But the evidence presented in this article about Zeppelin being a "force for peace" is anecdotal and circumstantial at best. Plant certainly had a hippie-mystic bent about him that presented a worldview more encouraging than, say, Zep's contemporary Black Sabbath (although that band's "War Pigs" definitely fits into the political-protest category). But having attended my share of midnight screenings of Zep's turgid concert-cum-fantasy film _The Song Remains the Same_ while in various states of consciousness, perhaps Zep's music functions as the soundtrack for stoners too high to cause any ruckus. Or to notice that this "force for peace" became a force partly through its exploitation of labor--namely, the expropriation of blues songs without crediting their sources for its lucrative revenue stream.

This is all a big surprise to me. A a kid, I was a big fan of "philosophic rock" (or maybe "philosophomoric" rock) - like the music of Kansas and Styx. But my memories of Led Zeppelin are mostly of endless playings of "Whole Lotta Love", and "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio - well into the 1980's I will always remember "Stairway to Heaven" along with Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" as the tunes that got played by the corporate media, incessantly, in order to keep from playing the enormous creative outpouring of great new music coming from across the pond back in the 1980's that, to this day, few USAns ever got a chance to hear.

Mr. Bramscher,
We can't expect every musical artist to be a Pete Seeger. If singing about unions and the poor and down trodden was a prerequisite for all rock musicians I think we would end up with something like Soviet-era propaganda. Led Zeppelin's lyrics tend to reach out to people on a different (perhaps more profound) level of a spiritual-existential-romantic realm rather than a strictly political one...but if you are familiar with, for example, Herbert Marcuse's work Eros and Civilization, keeping alive unmediated passionate responses to music and love can have a profoundly destabilizing, and thus radical, affect on the modern technical-bureucratic nation-state. Not all "politically" efficacious music must deal directly with politics.

A lot of bands from the 60's and 70's were hyped marketing products. Led Zeppelin was way deeper than this musically.

But how political were their lyrics? Most bands, unless they remain indie, must pass through some sort of political sanitization sieve. McCarthyism seems to have weeded the Pete Seegers almost completely out of mainstream music.

If they're busy moshing then they're too busy to kill.

LZ LZ LZ

Musicians give themselves such airs. You can play whatever you like on your electric guitars - won't stop people killing each other over who is God's favourite.

I saw them in '69 or '70. Their blues roots were not much deeper than Robert's "squeeze my lemon" reference. Luckily, I've seen scores of better bands.

I guess I now know why I was such an LZ airhead in those days.

Now I can't wait either - thanks, Mark and Salman!!!!!

Excellent article.

Something more is uncovered about Led Zeppplin that is deep and meaningful which I did not realize as I was singing along.

My previous knbowledge on the background/origins of their music consisted of that fact that J.R.R. Tolkein writings had influenced the band and that I was being exposed to Tolkein's mysticism in the lyrics I was singing, before I even read the Lord of the Rings.

Peace. Assalamo Alaikum.

Outtasight!

Bush is planning a preemptive strike on the concert.

"A Zeppelin made of lead could be flown into the Pentagon...those interested in stopping WW3 will understand why Page and Plant have to be captured and tortured"- Bush

Fascinating. I too had no idea of the influences but pieces like No Quarter were truly inspired.

This article also reminds me of the heavy influence of traditional Indian music on pop and rock during Zeppelin's formative years of the mid- to late 60s. I remember as a child hearing sitars in so much popular music of that era, and it's just a short leap from that to music from surrounding regions.

Wow! Great article. I knew the music was deeply exotic, but I didn't realize all of this about it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. LZ was my first rock concert -- 1973. LOL.